Lord of Shadow and Blood (The Courts of Daemonium #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter one

Rebirth

Xander

Blood.

It was all he could see. All he could smell.

All he could taste. He was covered in it from head to toe, chunks of flesh between his teeth and under his nails.

His soldier's uniform that had been too big for him, presumably due to its prior unfortunate owner being a larger build, now constricted his body and was slick to the touch.

His boots, once clean and polished, were covered in mud and guts.

I'm dying, he thought.

No man could survive losing this much blood, and the pain in his head and throat burned harsher than any fire he'd ever felt.

He looked down at his hands, inspecting the splashes of red against his light golden skin.

He must have been shot. The firing squad must have found him and shot him before he could run away from the battle that none of them cared about.

Xander had never been a true soldier, he was too lanky, he couldn’t even fill out the previously grey—now stained a dark-reddish brown—uniform he wore, yet he had been made to lead his small squad and join the ambush.

He struggled to keep opening his eyes every time he blinked; the blood coating his lashes caused his eyelids to stick together.

His long, dark hair clung to his face in the most unpleasant way and, if it weren’t for the metallic smell and taste, he would have assumed it was due to a torrential rain storm.

As he wiped his face with his sleeve, he finally saw his surroundings.

He was still on the battlefield. The same one his squad of soldiers had agreed to flee after cohesively realising they’d rather be killed as deserters than brutally murdered by an enemy attack, an enemy that they realistically had no personal quarrels with, yet an enemy they had been trained to fight nevertheless.

It looked the same as before, but without the stampedes of idiotic young men in uniforms too big for them charging from both sides.

There was no sound, not a single gunshot ran through the air, nor a shout or scream.

It was as if the entire battle had just stopped.

Xander tried to step forward, but his foot caught on something in his path. A man stared up at him from the ground, dead, his throat torn out with blood slowly pumping from the wound and pooling around his mangled body. And yet somehow, Xander felt he was staring into his soul.

The collision had startled him, causing Xander to fall back, but not before he noticed how young the man looked. Younger than Xander’s age of twenty and six. Too young to be drafted into war, too young to have met such a gruesome end.

He prepared himself for the harsh landing against his back but was surprised by a softer, warmer one. Feeling behind him in an attempt to try to get up, to get away from the staring man, he found more blood. More bodies.

There must have been dozens piled behind him, with more and more piles across the field.

Some he recognised as fellow soldiers from training sessions, which in reality were just a few days spent learning how to hold a musket and point it at the right person.

Others he noticed wore the uniform of the enemy.

The entire field, the entire battle, was lost on both sides.

Xander found the strength to stand, though his legs shook as they bore his weight now that the adrenaline was slowly wearing off and the ache in his body was creeping in.

The crimson stains across the ground painted the field with death, the mountain of bodies displayed like some kind of gruesome sculpture, and Xander stood at the centre: the artist, the creator of this horror.

Each still, contorted form sent a pulse of sickening familiarity in his mind.

A flicker of their desperate scramble through the mud flashed behind his eyes, the echoes of their choked pleas—cut short by the crunch of bone—rang in his ears, the metallic tang clinging to his tongue and teeth paid omen to the ghost of their lifeblood.

He had done this, he realised. He had killed them all. And he knew he had enjoyed it.

He began to walk through the field of dead, noting the similarities in the kills.

Throats torn out, necks crushed, skulls caved in, abdomens cut open.

He found his mouth watering at the sight of the fresh blood oozing from wounds of some of the fresher kills.

He was disgusted. And yet, he was hungry for more.

His debate on whether to sink his teeth into one of the warmer bodies was cut short when he heard his name being called.

"Xander! Xander! Brother, is that you?"

He recognised the voice. It was Deion, his second in command of their squad and brother in battle. He turned towards the sound and saw Deion’s familiar tall frame staggering his way. He, too, was covered in blood, though clearly not as much as Xander.

Deion stopped a few feet away and took in Xander's appearance. "My God, is that…"

"It is not mine," Xander replied, finally admitting his understanding that the blood he appeared to have been doused in did not belong to him. "None of it is mine. I don't have a single scratch on me."

Deion finally took in his surroundings, his dark eyes widening as he acknowledged the piles of bodies across the field.

A dawning horror blooming in his eyes gave way to a chilling comprehension, and as Xander watched the emotions flash over his face, his own vision began to swim, the edges blurring into a deep purple.

Through the haze, fragments of images darted in front of him, memories that clashed with the reality before him.

Only it wasn’t his own memories. The twisted and broken bodies that almost mirrored the scene around him, albeit on a much smaller scale, were not his kills.

They were Deion’s. He too had found himself surrounded by groups of dead soldiers, he too had become a monster.

"Xander," he stuttered. His rich black skin seemed to lose its warmth, as he looked as though he was going to vomit. "Brother, what have we done?"

Time seemed to warp, the present once again dissolving as Xander reeled his mind backwards. A montage of the past few hours played out, each moment a brutal revelation that he was able to pick apart and inspect. The killing, the feeding, the bloodlust, but before all of that: her.

“We did what she made us for,” Xander spoke, his voice sounding timid and unlike him. “We did what she wanted us to do.”

Deion gave him a look of confusion, clearly not understanding who he meant. But Xander remembered now, he remembered everything. And as he whispered her name, too afraid to voice it loudly for fear of her coming back, he watched as Deion remembered too.

“Lilith.”

Xander closed his eyes, the gruesome tableau before him eclipsed by the memory of her, the last memory he had as a mortal.

Her voice, even from his fragmented recollection through his previously human senses, was a melody woven from moonlight.

She called out to him in an impossibly angelic language that he knew with absolute certainty he wasn’t fluent in, and yet understood.

Her song had drifted through the trees behind where he and his squad laid low in the grass, trying not to be seen by any of the other soldiers on the field before they made their escape from the battle.

As his head turned of its own accord towards her voice, his ears straining to pick up her message, he finally began to understand.

“Alexander,” she cried, though not in sadness, but in what sounded to be pure ecstasy. “Alexander, come to me. Find me.”

Lost in her call, he didn’t even try to fight against the tug in his chest that pulled him to stand and face the trees, a willing puppet eager to dance to her tune.

And then he’d seen her… and all concept of reality fell away.

The only thing he could care about was the figure in white that beckoned him to join her, before she danced beyond the treeline and into the woods.

He rushed to follow her, to catch even a glimpse of the beautiful woman that seemed to control his very soul. He had not heard his friends’ frantic cries to stay with them, he couldn’t even hear the screams and gunshots from the battle. All he could sense was Lilith.

He had stumbled into the woods seeking her out, similar to how he used to drunkenly stagger out of the inn from his village to follow one of the girls back to their brothel.

He was a good looking man, he knew that, but he knew looks were just for display, appearances were only useful to appease others.

His mother had been beautiful, and that, in return, had been good for her business, good for pleasing men with pockets that were heavy with gold.

But when she became sick and had started to wither, so had her beauty, and she was no longer useful to the prying eyes of men, nor their heavy pockets, leaving Xander a poor orphan when death came for her.

Xander knew that beauty was just a tool to fulfil one’s desires. He appreciated the prettiness of the girls at home, just as he appreciated the soft sound of the tavern singers or the warmth of the sun, but he had never been taken by anyone’s looks. Not until Lilith.

He didn’t know how he knew her name, couldn’t remember ever learning it, but he felt as if he had known her his entire life. And so he had followed his desire for her deep into the woods.

The abrupt urge to rid himself of his weapons caused him to drop his rifle, along with his knives and sword.

He knew it was a terrible idea to approach unknown territory unarmed, and yet he could think of no reason to fear, thus no reason to prepare himself for an attack.

Not when her voice called out to him over and over.

“Alexander, my sweet. Come to me, my Alexander.”